Racing the Great White Way: A Counter History of Early 20th-Century Broadway

FAIN: FT-269883-20

Kathleen Nadine Johnson
Miami University (Oxford, OH 45056-1846)

Research and writing leading to a book about interracial collaboration in theater in New York City in the 1920s and 1930s, with analysis of performances staged on Broadway, in Harlem, in Greenwich, and in films.

I seek an NEH Summer Stipend to complete my third book, a monograph that charts a fresh account of one of the most vital moments of U.S. culture. Racing the Great White Way: a Counter History of 20th-Century Broadway shows that during a time when U.S. culture was profoundly segregated, the theatre was a site of interracial collaboration. Diverse theatre artists were integrating not only theatrical spaces, but also shaping aesthetics and cultural discourse. The project steers the reader away from the glistening lights of Broadway toward sparse performance spaces in the Village or the basement of the Public Library on 135th Street. Broadway and its adjacent spaces were not only major producers of theatre but also crucial architects of cultural work during the 1920s and 1930s. The central claim of the book is that by racing beyond Broadway, we discover not only a rich history of diverse theatrical performances, but also a powerful archive of U.S. culture transitioning to modernity.

Associated Products

Racing the Great White Way: Black Performance, Eugene O'Neill, and the Transformation of Broadway (Book)
Title: Racing the Great White Way: Black Performance, Eugene O'Neill, and the Transformation of Broadway
Author: Katie N. Johnson
Editor: LeAnn Fields
Abstract: The early drama of Eugene O’Neill, with its emphasis on racial themes and conflicts, opened up extraordinary opportunities for Black performers to challenge racist structures in modern theater and cinema. By adapting O’Neill’s dramatic text—changing scripts to omit offensive epithets, inserting African American music and dance, or including citations of Black internationalism—theater artists of color have used O’Neill’s dramatic texts to raze barriers in American and transatlantic theater. Challenging the widely accepted idea that Broadway was the white-hot creative engine of U.S. theater during the early 20th century, author Katie Johnson reveals a far more complex system of exchanges between the Broadway establishment and a vibrant Black theater scene in New York and beyond to chart a new history of American and transnational theater. In spite of their dichotomous (and at times problematic) representation of Blackness, O’Neill’s plays such as The Emperor Jones and All God’s Chillun Got Wings make ideal case studies because his work stimulated extraordinary, and underappreciated, traffic between Broadway and Harlem—between white and Black America. While it focuses on investigating Broadway productions of O’Neill, the book also attends to the vibrant transnational exchange in early to mid-20th century artistic production. Anchored in archival research, Racing the Great White Way recovers not only vital lost performance histories, but also the layered contexts for performing bodies across the Black Atlantic and the Circum-Atlantic.
Year: 2023
Primary URL: https://www.press.umich.edu/12340544/racing_the_great_white_way
Primary URL Description: Racing the Great White Way, at the University of Michigan Press
Access Model: Print and Open Access
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 978-0-472-0557
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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